The Public Service Academy - Let's Hope it Happens
Justin Bathon on Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1:51PM The big education story in the New York Times today is on the Public Service Academy and I wanted to highlight it because I am indirectly connected to it through a friend of a friend and it is gaining momentum to the point where it is probably more likely to happen than not (a lot of new folks in the Obama Administration support it, although not Obama himself, yet anyway).
Here's the idea: We have West Point to train the best of the best in the Army. We have the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. Why not have a top flight Academy for Government Servants as well? Students would get a four year free ride in exchange for five years of paid public service. In theory it is a win-win (as long as those students prove useful for the money the government spends on them).
My friend Suzanne Eckes, who worked in Mississippi with the guy who started it, told me about the idea as far back as a couple of years ago and I have never settled on whether I liked or disliked it. Several of the campuses around D.C. already serve this purpose, such as George Washington U., which my sister attends. And what of all the public oriented programs around the United States such as the Patterson School of Diplomacy here at UK? Plus, I don't really like the name (I hope the Congress gives it a name other than the Public Service Academy) and the logo is even worse (I think the need to hire a creative director!). On top of all that, there is no guarantee this is going to work. Are the best and brightest really going to go to the Public Service Academy rather than Kennedy School of Government? The military academies pretty much have a monopoly whereas this school would have to compete with the best of the best that have been around for centuries.
Well, I am officially going to support this idea and I will probably send a note to my Congressmen here in Kentucky about it. The fact is that we do need people more excited about being in government. Does anyone send their kid off to college to be a bureaucrat? Yet, as these hard times have made clear, we need to reflect on who really runs this country? Who's got this country's back when times are hard? Its our government servants that are there to steady the ship. As a country, we need the best and brightest to be willing to leave Wall Street and take a job on Independence Ave. (its the street on which the Department of Ed. sits). Yes, I think there will be challenges for the PSA (see, that doesn't work at all), but for a relatively low price (200 million/year) we could potentially train a consistent crop of educated and informed bureaucrats that could make our government better from the inside. I think that is a chance worth taking.
Reader Comments (4)
Such academy would have to be funded by nonprofit organizations to ensure that the curriculum is not biased to teach in a manner favorable to either private industry or the public sector. There has to be a balance.
Michael, I think the point would be to make it biased toward the public sector, just like the Naval Academy is biased toward the Navy. In order to enroll, students would have to agree to work in the public sector for 5 years, so every student enrolled would eventually be working for Uncle Sam.
Obviously, there are problems with that. Whether or not such as curriculum could produce students that question elements of our government and seek to improve them would be a key question. Often your best professors are the ones that question the most and inspire their students to do the same, so it would be a tough call to get professors that question government, but also support it so directly.
Another question, though, that your post made me thing of is the partisan nature of this institution. Whether faculty and students would be liberal (as is the case in most of higher education) or conservative (as is the case in the military academies) would be interesting. Obviously you would need to have a balance, but that might be difficult to achieve. That would be a very difficult problem to overcome.
Thanks for the plug, Justin. I appreciate your willingness to support this idea that has moved from the cotton fields of Mississippi where Suzi Eckes and I taught to the halls of Congress. Although I may disagree with you about the name, I'm glad you embrace the concept.
2009 is our "make or break" year, and we need you and your readers to help out -- thanks for contacting your rep. The old-fashioned work of democracy is going to make this happen!
Great post. I think you're right about how we need more young people to be excited about being in government.